No idea, I don’t use velero.
That’s what it looks like. FWIW, “leaving it initialized” is basically what you want. An uninitialized repository is empty and has no keys. If you delete the keys and config, all the existing data is lost.
You should only run restic init one time per repository. This creates the config and initial key. Running it a second time makes no sense, as the config and key already exist.